It uses ‘Quality of Work Life’ (QWL) - a scientific method for assessing and implementing employee feedback – in order to create a better work environment.

By applying QWL, VibeCatch claims to have helped companies improve profitability by up to 25%, thanks to greater employee engagement.

Juha Huttunen has been involved with startups for some twenty years now.

“I did try paid work for a few years, but that didn’t suit me”, he tells me over email.

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In fact VibeCatch’s 44 year old CEO has set up and run a number of business before embarking on this latest venture, most notably at the helm of Rakettitiede – a software consulting agency – for 7 years.

VibeCatch grew as a spin-off from Rakettitiede, which Huttunen left under new management to pursue his project in employee engagement. The tool was originally created for internal use to help Rakettitiede’s management lead people more effectively.

“When we realized that we had stumbled upon on a hot area in HR, and got some good feedback on the product, we decided to spin it off into a new startup and join forces with Marko Kesti, the leading researcher on how engagement affects productivity,” Huttunen explains.

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“I'm an engineer and a geek” he continues, and when he founded his first company as a fresh-faced 25 year old he focused much more on the practical side of things.

“Back then I only really believed in technology and numbers.”

Yet years of experience and learning have taught him that “hiring great people and building a great culture” are the cornerstones of any successful company.

And of course, it’s not just Huttunen that shares this view. Employee engagement is now widely discussed at most workplaces, and thankfully employees and HR teams are increasingly aware of how they should track this metric.

There are various tools available from the likes of IBM, SAP, Leidenschaft, and many more besides, that allow companies to measure employee engagement in a qualitative way and then act on the findings scientifically.

So what does Huttunen think makes VibeCatch different to any of these offerings?

“To my knowledge none of those companies you list, or any of our other competitors, have real, published and peer-reviewed science behind their solutions. My co-founder is professor Marko Kesti, who has studied how employee engagement affects employee productivity for over 10 years. He has published numerous papers on the subject too.”

“His major breakthrough has been to find a formula that reliably estimates how much employee productivity improves when employee engagement improves by a certain amount, when measured using his QWL index. His research is globally unique and is usually the main reason companies are interested in getting to know our software better. It really differentiates us from the competition.”

QWL - ‘Quality of Work Life’ - is VibeCatch’s unique approach to employee engagement, based on a list of fifteen strategically selected questions. Employee responses from the QWL survey are then collated, and taken together the results show areas businesses need to improve upon, as well as highlighting the weaknesses that fail to show on traditional employee surveys. This data is analysed by VibeCatch, and then delivered to management and HR teams so that they can act on the findings.

“If you improve your QWL score by a certain percentage we are able to tell you how much that is worth in euros for the company. Something no one else can credibly do. That makes investments into company culture easy to measure in terms of effectiveness and ROI,” Huttunen clarifies.

“25% is exceptional, for sure”

The company states that this method has allowed some of its clients to improve profitability by up to 25%, in under 12 months, thanks to increased engagement. I’m curious to understand how VibeCatch is able to attribute such impressive growth to their QWL analysis alone, and whether this is a one-off, or if they expect most companies using their solution to enjoy similar results.

“25% is exceptional, for sure” Huttunen clarifies, “although we have seen a few such results. One of our clients has dozens of stores, and they used the QWL method to improve engagement in a selection of these stores.”

“The stores using QWL improved profits by 25% in a year when compared to the other stores. The company attributes the difference in results solely down to our QWL method. It does makes sense though - as a result of higher employee engagement those stores running QWL grew their ‘sales per visit/customer’, which in turn led to higher profits without having to increase personnel costs.”

“That said not everyone should aim for a 25% improvement. For most companies even a very modest financial result improvement would be a 10x return on the cost of using VibeCatch,” he concludes.

The company is funded by Superhero Capital, Tekes and selected business angels. Currently most of their customers are in Finland, though there are plans to expand to the UK and Central Europe (more specifically Germany and the Netherlands) in the near future.